Cupid is winged, allegedly because lovers are flighty and likely to change their minds, and boyish because love is irrational. His symbols are the arrow and torch, "because love wounds and inflames the heart". These attributes and their interpretation were established by late antiquity, as summarized by
Isidore of Seville (d. 636 AD) in his
Etymologiae. Cupid is also sometimes depicted blindfolded and described as blind, not so much in the sense of sightless—since the sight of the beloved can be a spur to love—as blinkered and arbitrary. As described by
Shakespeare in ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (1590s): In
Botticelli's
Allegory of Spring (1482), also known by its Italian title
La Primavera, Cupid is shown blindfolded while shooting his arrow, positioned above the central figure of Venus. Particularly in ancient Roman art, cupids may also carry or be surrounded by fruits, animals, or attributes of the
Seasons or the wine-god
Dionysus, symbolizing the earth's generative capacity. Having all these associations, Cupid is considered to share parallels with the Hindu god
Kama. File:Edme Bouchardon, Cupid, 1744, NGA 41708.jpg|
Edme Bouchardon, Cupid, 1744,
National Gallery of Art File:Eros bow Musei Capitolini MC410.jpg|
Classical statue of Cupid with his bow
Cupid's arrows Cupid carries two kinds of arrows, or darts, one with a sharp golden point, and the other with a blunt tip of lead. A person wounded by the golden arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire, but the one struck by the lead feels aversion and desires only to flee. The use of these arrows is described by the
Latin poet Ovid in the first book of his
Metamorphoses. When
Apollo taunts Cupid as the lesser archer, Cupid shoots him with the golden arrow, but strikes the object of his desire, the nymph
Daphne, with the lead. Trapped by Apollo's unwanted advances, Daphne prays to her father, the river god
Peneus, who turns her into a laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo. It is the first of several unsuccessful or tragic love affairs for Apollo. This theme is somewhat mirrored in the story of
Echo and Narcissus, as the goddess
Juno forces the nymph Echo's love upon Narcissus, who is cursed by the goddess
Nemesis to be self absorbed and unresponsive to her desires. A variation is found in
The Kingis Quair, a 15th-century poem attributed to
James I of Scotland, in which Cupid has three arrows: gold, for a gentle "smiting" that is easily cured; the more compelling silver; and steel, for a love-wound that never heals.
Cupid and the bees In the tale of Cupid the honey thief, the child-god is stung by bees when he steals honey from their hive. He cries and runs to his mother Venus, complaining that so small a creature should not cause such painful wounds. Venus laughs, and points out the poetic justice: he too is small, and yet delivers the sting of love. The story was first told about Eros in the
nineteenth Idyll of
Theocritus (3rd century BC). It was retold numerous times in both art and poetry during the Renaissance. The theme brought the
Amoretti poetry cycle (1595) of
Edmund Spenser to a conclusion, and furnished subject matter for at least twenty works by
Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop. The German poet and classicist
Karl Philipp Conz (1762–1827) framed the tale as
Schadenfreude ("taking pleasure in someone else's pain") in a poem by the same title. In a version by
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a writer of the
German Enlightenment, the incident prompts Cupid to turn himself into a bee: Through this sting was Amor made wiser.The untiring deceiverconcocted another battle-plan:he lurked beneath the carnations and rosesand when a maiden came to pick them,he flew out as a bee and stung her. The image of Cupid as a bee is part of a complex tradition of poetic imagery involving the flower of youth, the sting of love as a deflowering, and honey as a secretion of love.
Cupid and dolphins In both ancient and later art, Cupid is often shown riding a
dolphin. On
ancient Roman sarcophagi, the image may represent the soul's journey, originally associated with
Dionysian religion. A mosaic from late
Roman Britain shows a procession emerging from the mouth of the sea god
Neptune, first dolphins and then sea birds, ascending to Cupid. One interpretation of this allegory is that Neptune represents the soul's origin in the matter from which life was fashioned, with Cupid triumphing as the soul's desired destiny. In other contexts, Cupid with a dolphin recurs as a playful motif, as in garden statuary at
Pompeii that shows a dolphin rescuing Cupid from an octopus, or Cupid holding a dolphin. The dolphin, often elaborated fantastically, might be constructed as a spout for a fountain. On a modern-era fountain in the
Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence, Italy, Cupid seems to be strangling a dolphin. Dolphins were often portrayed in antiquity as friendly to humans, and the dolphin itself could represent affection.
Pliny records a tale of a dolphin at
Puteoli carrying a boy on its back across a lake to go to school each day; when the boy died, the dolphin grieved itself to death. In erotic scenes from mythology, Cupid riding the dolphin may convey how swiftly love moves, or the Cupid astride a sea beast may be a reassuring presence for the wild ride of love. A dolphin-riding Cupid may attend scenes depicting the wedding of Neptune and
Amphitrite or the Triumph of Neptune, also known as a marine
thiasos.
Demon of fornication To adapt myths for Christian use, medieval mythographers interpreted them morally. In this view, Cupid is seen as a "demon of
fornication". The innovative
Theodulf of Orleans, who wrote during the reign of
Charlemagne, reinterpreted Cupid as a seductive but malicious figure who exploits desire to draw people into an allegorical underworld of vice. To Theodulf, Cupid's quiver symbolized his depraved mind, his bow trickery, his arrows poison, and his torch burning passion. It was appropriate to portray him naked, so as not to conceal his deception and evil. This conception largely followed Cupid's attachments to lust, but would later be diluted as many Christians embraced Cupid as a symbolic representation of love.
Sleeping Cupid Cupid sleeping became a symbol of absent or languishing love in Renaissance poetry and art, including a
Sleeping Cupid (1496) by
Michelangelo that is now lost. The ancient type was known at the time through descriptions in classical literature, and at least one extant example had been displayed in the sculpture garden of
Lorenzo de' Medici since 1488. In the 1st century AD,
Pliny had described two marble versions of a
Cupid (Eros), one at
Thespiae and a nude at
Parium, where it was the stained object of erotic fascination. Michelangelo's work was important in establishing the reputation of the young artist, who was only twenty at the time. At the request of
Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, his patron, he increased its value by deliberately making it look "antique", thus creating "his most notorious fake". After the deception was acknowledged, the
Cupid Sleeping was displayed as evidence of his virtuosity alongside an ancient marble, attributed to
Praxiteles, of Cupid asleep on a lion skin. In the poetry of
Giambattista Marino (d. 1625), the image of Cupid or
Amore sleeping represents the indolence of Love in the lap of Idleness. A
madrigal by his literary rival
Gaspare Murtola exhorted artists to paint the theme. A catalogue of works from antiquity collected by the
Mattei family, patrons of
Caravaggio, included sketches of sleeping cupids based on sculpture from the
Temple of Venus Erycina in Rome. Caravaggio, whose works Murtola is known for describing, took up the challenge with his 1608
Sleeping Cupid, a disturbing depiction of an unhealthy, immobilized child with "jaundiced skin, flushed cheeks, bluish lips and ears, the emaciated chest and swollen belly, the wasted muscles and inflamed joints". The model is thought to have suffered from
juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Caravaggio's sleeping Cupid was reconceived in
fresco by
Giovanni da San Giovanni, and the subject recurred throughout Roman and Italian work of the period.
Love Conquers All Earlier in his career, Caravaggio had challenged contemporary sensibilities with his "sexually provocative and anti-intellectual"
Victorious Love, also known as
Love Conquers All (Amor Vincit Omnia), in which a brazenly naked Cupid tramples on emblems of culture and erudition representing music, architecture, warfare, and scholarship. The motto comes from the
Augustan poet
Vergil, writing in the late 1st century BC. His collection of
Eclogues concludes with what might be his most famous line:
Omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori.Love conquers all, and so let us surrender ourselves to Love. The theme was also expressed as the
triumph of Cupid, as in the
Triumphs of
Petrarch. ==Roman
Cupid==